• Question: What first inspired you to want to study, what you are studying at the moment??

    Asked by kate95 to Yvette, Sian, Michaela, Louise on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Michaela Livingstone

      Michaela Livingstone answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Well for one my curiousity drove me in general to want to find out answers to things like how do parents pass on their characteristics to their children? How does evolution happen? Etc… of which I found some of the answers in the awesome comic book guide to genetics 😀

      Right now I’m doing experiments to try and work out how a couple of proteins are involved in allowing a gene’s message to get out of the control-centre of a cell, it’s nucleus, and in to the factory, the cytoplasm, so that it can be made in to a protein. If the message doesn’t get out then the protein can’t be made and that gene is essentially switched ‘off’.

    • Photo: Louise Johnson

      Louise Johnson answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I study a few different things but transposons, or “jumping genes”, are my favourite. I first heard of them when I read the book “The Selfish Gene” and then I found out more about them at university.

    • Photo: Sian Harding

      Sian Harding answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Reading the biology section of a Childrens encyclopeadia. At the moment I am studying a kind of heart failure that happens quickly after a shock, but goes away again quickly. I have a theory that it may actually be a way for the heart to protect itself from overstimulation

    • Photo: Yvette Wilson

      Yvette Wilson answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      definitely the diversity of lifeforms and conservation biology at first! I have changed fields since then to work more on plant genetics because i also find it so interesting.

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